WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested by British police, after he was kicked out by the Ecuadorean embassy in London, for violating his terms of asylum while inside the Embassy. His arrest is coming almost seven years after he was admitted by his South American hosts.
The Wikileaks founder who was arrested on Thursday morning after his asylum was abruptly revoked by President of Ecuador. He was photographed looking agitated, and frail, while being forced out of the Embassy by the British Police this morning.
Julian Assange with white hair and a white beard was carried out of the embassy by at least seven men to a waiting police van.
The London Metropolitan Police said they arrested Julian Assange after being “invited into the embassy by the Ambassador, following the Ecuadorean government’s withdrawal of asylum.”
Assange is wanted by the US, after WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables that laid bare often highly critical U.S. appraisals of world leaders, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to members of the Saudi royal family.
Assange made international headlines in early 2010 when WikiLeaks published a classified U.S. military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people.
In 2012 he took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, behind the luxury department store Harrods, to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation.
Sweden dropped that investigation in 2017, but Assange was arrested on Thursday for breaking the rules of his original bail in London. A Swedish lawyer representing the alleged rape victim said on Thursday she would push to have prosecutors reopen the investigation.
Assange’s relationship with his hosts collapsed after Ecuador accused him of leaking information about President Lenin Moreno’s personal life.
Both Britain and other countries, US especially who have been wanting for his extradition to face criminal trials will be happy to hear this news. The process could be longer than we think though, as he face a possible death to life sentence if found guilty. We wait to see what happens with the British and President Donald Trump on this latest development.
(Reuters/Yellowdanfo)